How I Use GitHub Actions to Automate My Life (and My One-Person Company)

If you run a one-person company, you quickly learn a simple truth:

You’re always understaffed.
Automation is your only employee.

GitHub Actions has become one of my most reliable tools—not for CI/CD, not for deployments, but for running my life and my workflows.

In this post, I'll show exactly how I use GitHub Actions as a free, always-on automation engine to support my daily routines, my internal tools, and my one-person company’s operations.

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Why GitHub Actions Works So Well for Solo Developers

GitHub Actions is:

• free
• cloud-based
• reliable
• cron-capable
• easy to version-control
• available 24/7
• runs Python beautifully
• great for small periodic jobs

For a solo developer, this makes it perfect as a personal automation engine.

Most people use it for CI/CD.

I use it to run my life.

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What I Automate with GitHub Actions

Here’s my 2025 schedule of automations:

Daily

• Generate Notion daily report
• Backup Notion → CSV
• Log productivity metrics
• Sync tasks from different databases

Weekly

• Weekly summary generation (Friday)
• Back up content drafts
• Update my “Company Operating Log”

Monthly

• Archive old tasks
• Export data snapshots
• Rotate logs

Ad-hoc

• Trigger FastAPI microservices
• Trigger n8n workflows
• Run small Python scripts

GitHub Actions is basically my personal cron server—and it’s 100% free.

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Example: Daily Report Generator (Python + GitHub Actions)

This is one of my simplest, most useful automations.

Folder structure:

automation/
  daily_report.py
.github/
  workflows/
    daily-report.yml

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daily_report.py (Minimal Working Example)

import requests
import datetime

NOTION_KEY = "YOUR_NOTION_KEY"
DATABASE_ID = "YOUR_DATABASE_ID"

headers = {
    "Authorization": f"Bearer {NOTION_KEY}",
    "Notion-Version": "2022-06-28",
    "Content-Type": "application/json"
}

def create_report():
    today = datetime.date.today().isoformat()
    url = "https://api.notion.com/v1/pages"

    payload = {
        "parent": {"database_id": DATABASE_ID},
        "properties": {
            "Name": {
                "title": [{"text": {"content": f"Daily Report - {today}"}}]
            },
            "Date": {"date": {"start": today}}
        }
    }

    r = requests.post(url, headers=headers, json=payload)

    if r.status_code == 200:
        print("Created successfully")
    else:
        print("Error:", r.text)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    create_report()

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GitHub Actions workflow: .github/workflows/daily-report.yml

name: Daily Report

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: "0 1 * * *"  # Run every day at 01:00 UTC
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  run-script:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3

      - name: Set up Python
        uses: actions/setup-python@v4
        with:
          python-version: "3.11"

      - name: Install dependencies
        run: pip install requests

      - name: Run script
        env:
          NOTION_KEY: ${{ secrets.NOTION_KEY }}
          DATABASE_ID: ${{ secrets.DATABASE_ID }}
        run: python automation/daily_report.py

This workflow:

• Runs every morning
• Writes a fresh daily report into Notion
• Requires no server
• Costs $0
• Never forgets to run

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Other Automations I Run

Here are some of the other scripts powered by GitHub Actions in my stack:

1️⃣ Notion → CSV backup

Exports Notion database into CSV every midnight.

2️⃣ Weekly summary generator

Every Friday, my Python script:

• fetches Notion logs
• aggregates tasks
• writes a weekly overview

3️⃣ Personal productivity logger

Tracks:

• completed tasks
• time blocks
• work categories

4️⃣ Triggering n8n workflow

Using:

curl -X POST <n8n-webhook>

5️⃣ FastAPI endpoint tests

Mini-checks to keep microservices alive.

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Why This Approach Works for a Solo Developer

Because GitHub Actions gives you:

✔ A free server

No VPS. No maintenance.

✔ A reliable scheduler

Cron jobs in the cloud.

✔ A version-controlled automation hub

All workflows tracked.

✔ Secure secret storage

Notion API keys stored in GitHub Secrets.

✔ Perfect integration with Python

No “server setup”, just run scripts.

✔ The mindset shift

You stop doing things manually.

You start thinking in systems.

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What’s Next in My Automation Roadmap

In 2025–2026 I plan to automate:

• Invoice generation
• Project heatmap analytics
• Automatic content pipeline
• FastAPI service scheduled tasks
• Client updates via email/slack
• AI-assisted knowledge base
• Automated Upwork proposal logs

Automation is my second brain, and GitHub Actions is its backbone.

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If You Want More

I can share:

• How I manage secrets securely
• How I deploy microservices
• How my Notion → GitHub backup works
• My full “Ops Dashboard” blueprint
• My complete automation folder structure

Just comment and I’ll write it.

Thanks for reading — and happy automating!

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